24 Nov 93 – Xian – super day! Pan Po Neolithic village excavation plus exhibitions…
-> silk shops & terracotta factory ->terracotta warriors – saw two pits (1 & 3) plus exhibits…
Of course, in those days you could get up close and personal with the 3rd century BCE relics that comprise the terracotta army…
…oh, all right, I just made that bit up – of course you couldn’t get close to the actual relics and you couldn’t even take pictures of them, let alone with them. We were advised to take our holiday snaps in the factory.
-> lunch (nice vegetables)…
One of the advantages of getting deeper into China was that the restaurants were less reliant on westernised ingredients and made do with the local produce. The resulting vegetables cooked in a Chinese style were more to our taste than a lot of the bland meals we’d been served in larger cities. Janie and I were distinctly in the minority on the tour with our praise for this meal.
-> medicine market…
This is one of my favourite memories of the whole China tour. I wanted to buy some Chinese spices to take home, so this “medicine market” was right up my street. In China, the distinction between herbs and spices for food and for medicine is wafer thin.
No-one spoke any English and we didn’t have a guide who could help me to transact. But I was able to recognise, by sight and smell, the components of five spice. My idea was to buy a small quantity of each of those components, mix them up, place them in a spice grinder when I got home and thus be able to cook Chinese food with flavoursome, fresh ground spice that I had personally brought back from China.
I found a patient-looking woman spice merchant. Using pointing and hand gestures I indicated the five spices I wanted and that she could mix all five together.
The only remaining issue was the quantity I wanted.
In those days, there were two currencies in China. The local currency, Renminbi, was not translatable into other currencies, tourists were not even permitted to use it. Tourists were issued with Foreign Exchange Certificates (FECs) which tourists and locals could use and which were, at that time, translatable at 8.5 FECs to the £. Strangely, that rate is quite similar to the rate prevailing today for the single Chinese currency, which is known both as the Yuan and (confusingly) Renminbi.
I tendered the smallest note I had; a 5 FEC note – worth a little under 60p in UK money. I figured I’d get a nice little bag of spices for that money.
The merchant did not recognise the FEC as money at all, so wanted to reject my offer. She showed me her local money and I tried, through gestures, to explain that I didn’t have it and that I couldn’t use it even if I had it.
I knew that the FEC was legal tender for her; she was simply unfamiliar with it, so I gently thrust my 5 FEC note at her again.
She went off with my note to consult with fellow merchants. I could tell that one of them was convincing her to take my money. Presumably, that more knowledgeable friend also told her how much money I had tendered (and/or possibly made her an offer to exchange the note), because the merchant’s eyes lit up, she hurried to grab a carrier bag and started shovelling huge quantities of spice into the bag.
Once she had filled up one carrier bag, she grabbed another large carrier bag and started to shovel spices into the second bag. I tried to stop her – she was very welcome to my 5 FECs without honouring the deal with, in her terms, the requisite quantity of spices. It hadn’t occurred to me that the FEC was so ridiculously overvalued in local terms, that my 60p was a heck of a lot of money to this merchant and therefore worth a heck of a lot of spices.
One and a half carrier-bags-full of spices, to be specific.
I off-loaded some spices onto one or two reasonably adventurous fellow tourists, but still ended up bringing home a ludicrous quantity of spices; I was using that stash for years and years after our return.
->City Wall (bought cuff links) -> food market…
Janie was in her element in the food market, snapping away. This was the first place we visited where the locals seemed quite happy to be photographed in this way. I think Xian was not yet used to seeing lots of tourists, so we were as much a novelty to the locals as the locals were a novelty to us.
-> hotel to change -> mini banquet followed by amazingly naff Tang dynasty show (Janie and I left early).
Janie and I sat through some pretty awful shows on that tour, so that Tang dynasty one must have been especially bad.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 66 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
